For the general public, recording images as they happen has become a national pastime. Camera and video recording technology has been incorporated into many commonly known products, such as microscopes, telescopes and binoculars.
Recording of video images from a common set of binoculars allows the user to identify and record events at great distances. U.S. Pat. No. 4,067,027 to Yamazaki discloses a binocular telescope containing a camera for photographing object scenes through the binocular lenses. Yamazakils invention is useful for users that wish to capture still images, but fails to allow the user to capture full video images.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,571,628 to Thornton discloses a binocular video viewing assembly having an integral object lens. The object lens observes the predetermined field of viewing and a processing assembly converts the resulting video image into electrical video signals. The electrical video signals are transferred to and stored in a remotely located video recorder. A liquid crystal display device is located within the video viewing assembly to display playback of video recorded on the remotely located video recorder. Thornton's device includes two eyepieces, like binoculars, and a single viewing lens. Although Thornton's device has the appearance and feel of binoculars, the single viewing lens generates only a single two-dimensional image, whereas binoculars allow the user to view a three-dimensional image. Also, Thornton's device fails to be fully portable because the video recorder is remotely located and must accompany the device in order to record images.
There is a need for a completely portable combined video camera and binocular system that permits storage of a visual image. Preferably, such a device will permit three dimensional viewing of objects simultaneous to recording of those objects.